About this Site

Background:
The Travel Web site was initially created as a gift for
Dan Walker's 60th
birthday from his family, and will be completed over a period of time,
when time permits.

Technical: Where is Dan
Follow Dan across the globe! Using satellites and a Global Positioning
System (GPS) technologies, Dan is now able to transmit his coordinates
on a daily basis (providing he can find an Internet connection in the
country he is in). Dan uses a GPS to locate his coordinates.

Technical: Photo Album
The Photos seen in the photoalbum were taken using a digital
camera. Custom software was written to archive (ZIP) the photos into a
single file for upload. On the server, custom software extracts the photos
from the archive and adds them to a MySQL database. Through administrative Web
pages, Dan is able to create/modify photo albums and add comments to the
photographs. Most of the server-side software is written in PHP (see below).

Technical: Travel Journals
Throughout his travels, Dan always sends out regular travel journal updates
via email to a custom mailing list (consisting of mostly friends and family).
A program was written using procmail
to receive travel journal updates via email, and automatically add them to
Website.

Technical: Maps
All maps were originally generated in 2001 using the (now defunct) Xerox PARC Map Server. A
program was written to automatically request all of the quadrants from the
map server, download them and chop it up to be
the correct size. The map colourization was a painful manual process.
Map layering was done using HTML CSS-P (Layers).

Technical: Website
The entire Website is written using the
PHP Web programing language. Backend
database is MySql. The server is a
RedHat Linux server.